Roy Schoeman, was born in a suburb of New York City of "Conservative" Jewish parents who had fled Nazi Germany.  His Jewish education and formation was received under some of the most prominent Rabbis in contemporary American Jewry, including Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, probably the foremost Conservative Rabbi in the U.S. and his hometown Rabbi growing up;  Rabbi Arthur Green, later the head of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College who was his religion teacher and mentor during high school and early college; and Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, a prominent Hasidic Rabbi with whom he lived in Israel for several months. His secular education included a B.Sc. from M.I.T. and an M.B.A. magna cum laude from Harvard Business School. Midway through a career of teaching and consulting (he had been appointed to the faculty of the Harvard Business School) he experienced an unexpected and instantaneous conversion to Christianity which led to a dramatic refocus of his activities. Since then he has pursued theological studies at several seminaries, helped produce and host a Catholic Television talk show, and edited and written for several Catholic books and reviews. 

Interview starts with a minute of shared prayer to Our Lady, asking for her intersession for us.

SFC: Thank you for meeting with me Roy. So do you have much of an interest in films?

RS: Well I didn’t see a movie for about twenty years. I am kind of getting into it now, but I’m not sure if it’s healthy or not. Actually I’m starting to spend more time on aeroplanes and watching more movies there.

SFC: I do question it myself sometimes; especially when I hear a few Catholics are even giving up their televisions, but I do think it has a place.

RS: You know what bothers me? If I see a movie, for the next two or three days, when I’m trying to pray, images and even situations in the movie come to mind. In other words, when you’re stilling your mind, those images are so strong, not only physical but even emotional violence and situations, that when things start slowing down, you’re getting this almost flood of irrelevant images. 

SFC: I can relate to that, but on the other hand, if that can affect you in a negative way, I think there’s certainly the possibility that it can affect you in a positive way and bring you peace too.

RS: Give me an example.

SFC: Okay, Into Great Silence, have you seen that one?

RS: Oh yeah well, that’s not really fair! 

SFC: Okay what about Babette’s Feast, have you seen that?

RS: I have seen Babette’s Feast, but before my conversion. I have to see it again because at the time I thought it was a horribly anti-religious, but since I became Catholic many have told me it’s this Catholic allegory… so I think I got it wrong. See, if you look at it not from Catholic eyes, you have all of these religious Christians that have this completely pointless, dreary, hate-filled lives, and you have this pagan epicurean who brings them salvation through hedonism. And all of a sudden there’s peace and love and real Christianity because she’s come in with this big feast, so that’s how I saw it, but I think I was wrong.

SFC: Okay, and other films, you must have seen The Passion.

RS: I did, and I actually saw it with Mel the first time.

SFC: And what was your take on that?

RS: I’m very appreciative of it – I know how many conversions it has produced. Some of it I didn’t like though… I did not like the pre-Passion depiction of Jesus at all – I thought it was insipid. He’s raising the host at the last supper saying “Taaake and eaaat, do this in memory of me…” it’s kind of that syrupy, your soccer-pal Jesus. I’m being a little cruel perhaps, but the Pre-Passion Jesus didn’t have enough gravitas for my tast. Does that make sense?

SFC: It does yes, I don’t know if you heard of the BBC/HBO production recently made of the Passion, I haven’t watched it all through myself, I’ve caught clips here and there, but from what I’ve seen and from what I’ve read, they’ve just taken all the transcendence of Jesus out of it; they’ve taken out all his miracles, he’s a softly spoken man, and it’s a clear example of 2 Corinthians 11:14: “… if someone comes to you and preaches a Jesus other than the Jesus we preached… you put up with it easily enough”, and there is a real danger in that; in presenting Jesus as just another good moral teacher. 

RS: Well this is more an artistic call about characterisation, but the last supper was like the heaviest thing in human history, and to have it look like a kind of folksy, relaxed meal… and Mary I didn’t like, Mary looked drawn and haggard, and in fact Mary Magdalene looked fresher than Mary, and that didn’t seem to resonate with me.

SFC: I take it you haven’t seen The Nativity Story then?

RS: No, no I haven’t seen that one.

SFC: Well a lot of Catholic critics picked up on that one, where Mary is depicted as this sulky teenager in an attempt to try and make it contemporary.

SFC: You state in your book (Salvation is from the Jews), with respect to Wagner’s opera Parsifal that “Some see its mixture of magic, occultism, and Christian symbolism to be thinly veiled paganism; others see it as Christianity, expressed in allegory. Whichever Wagner’s intent might have been, this very ambiguity perfectly suited the Nazi’s plan…” (pp224). And I do think that there’s a lot coming out in films now with this ambiguity, where people are quite keen to jump on any little Christian allegory that you can take from a film, for example Star Wars, and Soul Food Cinema has just published the English-language versions of the L’Osservatore Romano article on Harry Potter in which one guy is arguing for the Christian basis of the books, and one guy arguing against. Also The Lord of the Rings, the films anyway (I haven’t read the books), I think there’s a lot of ambiguity there. Do you think there’s a danger in that? In expressing no firm opinion, in being too weak in our art? Cont'd...